Beverley Prevatt Goldstein was born in Trinidad in 1950. She had a comfortable childhood in Belmont, Port-of-Spain, pitching marbles, teaching dolls of corn cobs and mango stones, continuously reading, going to ballet classes, Chinese restaurants, with long family holidays with all her cousins at the seaside in Mayaro. She has two sisters and a brother, plus innumerable cousins, four of whom were born in the same year as Beverley. The prevailing white/black hierarchy had little noticeable impact on Beverley who played with her cousins and all the neighbouring children, mostly of varied African and Chinese descent. The wider family offered much support during the long illness of her mother. Sadly in 1959 her mother died. Subsequently, her father remarried and moved to the Bahamas, and the three girls came to England to undertake further education. In hindsight the move to England might have been precipitated by the forthcoming 1962 Immigration Act as from then British nationals from the black Commonwealth had restricted entry to the UK.
Beverley chose to accompany her sisters but while the older girls went to boarding school she chose to live with an aunt and uncle and their family with whom she had spent much time in Trinidad. She recalls a very different life style, two adults and eight children cramped in a small flat in a bitterly cold winter which seemed to last almost all year. The 1962-63 winter is one of the coldest recorded in British history and was dubbed the Big Freeze. Beverley remembers many good times in this family, where despite relative poverty and isolation they re-created some of the Caribbean feel, with Saturday soup, family friends visiting and the discipline, education and church focus of the Caribbean home. After a few years they moved into a three-bedroomed house with its own garden, luxury, where everyone had their own bed and the three girls their own shared room. Beverley has great memories of wonderful family Christmases in North London where at least 24 people sat down to a Trinidadian Christmas breakfast and dinner and, as a teenager, of the occasional Caribbean parties with ska and reggae and Millie’s ‘My boy lollipop!’
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The family settled well into their London suburb, making friends with English and Irish neighbours and tolerating the overt racism such as ‘N… go home’ a constant graffiti on the walls of the local train station. The adults substituted the phrase ‘life in the Tropics’ for that of ‘life in London’ which had been erroneously esteemed prior to experiencing it.
Beverley excelled at school, building on the excellent education in Trinidad and encouraged by the black teachers (who took her out to the theatre) and one of the nuns (who brought her Sanatogen tonic wine during exams) was the first person from her school to attend Oxford University (B.A. Hons History, 1968-1971) and one of the first Black women to enrol at Oxford from a mainstream British school. Beverley enjoyed the very different world of Oxford (her own room, the tea time rituals, the Oxford Union with its cinnamon toast and upper-class groups). She recalls that there were a few mostly foreign black students but no black lecturers. She had gained a sense of black consciousness largely from her uncle during her teenage years and this was developed during her time at Oxford, where she went on anti-apartheid demonstrations, was a member and treasurer of the Joint Action Committee Against Racial Intolerance (JACARI), where she met her partner. She consistently chose to focus on themes relevant to this black consciousness, which influenced her choice of social work as a career and her dissertation ‘Black Supplementary Schools’.
Beverley worked as a generic social worker (child care and mental health) with Berkshire and Oxfordshire, after qualifying in social work at New Barnet House. In 1974, she and her husband moved to Hull, as her husband had secured a job at Hull University. Beverley was unemployed, isolated in a bare, unfurnished flat and it rained every day for the first six weeks! Life improved when she made friends from the university wives group and was employed as a social worker in Bransholme, meeting wonderful colleagues and clients. Unusually, and to Hull Social Services Department’s credit, Beverley was able to work with home helps and community medical teams to promote the well-being of every elderly or vulnerable person in her patch of streets. Her sixteen years in Hull, mostly at Burniston Road and Hymers Avenue had two main themes: family and social work, both influenced by her anti-racism. All her 4 children were born during this time, at the maternity home on Cottingham Road, at Beverley Westwood and at home in Hymers Avenue. She returned to work when her youngest was a few months old, this time specialising in adoption and fostering city wide.
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She became a member of the local Harmony group, eventually chairing the national group. The aim of the group then was to provide multi-racial families opportunities to socialise with like families, to enable the children to feel at ease and proud of their black identity and to diminish the racist attitudes impacting on the children. Racism was met at every turn, expressed by a local primary school headteacher, a local priest, a Social Services manager, children and adults at playgrounds and libraries, a local councillor who objected to a grant for the group to host an unlearning racism conference with the words ‘we will next be giving money to one-arm, black lesbians’ and even from a superficially friendly neighbour who expressed the wish that Beverley’s house would not be sold to another ‘coloured’ family. Beverley filled her home with books and toys that offered her children the option of a positive black identity and with Harmony friends sold similar books, toys and offered children workshops on black history and culture locally and nationally.
The Harmony conference on ‘Unlearning Racism’ at Hull University connected Hull Harmony with national networks such as ALTARF (All London Teachers against Racism Forum); EYTARN (Early Years Trainers Against Racism Network), ACER (African Caribbean Educational Resource), WGARCR (Working Group Against Racism in Children’s Resources) and with Building Blocks nurseries in London committed to tackling racism and encouraging a positive black identity for their black children. Beverley went on to speak at their conferences and to become an anti-racist trainer. This then benefitted her social work where she incorporated this into her training of foster carers and adopters. She produced a leaflet on ‘Caring for black children’, with the support of Humberside Training section, to counteract the then poor practice, including foster carers content with black children hiding their skin under white powder. Beverley remembers supportive colleagues, fantastic adopters, a caring headteacher (at St Vincent’s school) and outstandingly kind neighbours (who taught her to knit). These, with her continued activism including her anti-racism workshops for Barnardos, key note speech at the Congress of Black Catholics, publication of ‘Unequal Access, The Housing Experience of Black People’ (CARJ, 1993) enabled her to tolerate the everyday racism. Hull, the birthplace of her children and the scene of her happy family life would always remain special.
Beverley revisited Trinidad in 1980, returned often during the next decade enjoying time with her siblings, wider family and the carnival celebrations. In 1990, when her husband accepted a professorship at Durham university she returned to Trinidad with the four children to give them a better taste of Caribbean life and a majority black society. It was beneficial for all, though perhaps most satisfying for Beverley who after relocating in Newcastle, England, in 1991, has returned almost every year treating the Atlantic Ocean ‘like a big puddle that would not stop her being where she wanted to be’. These connections were very important as her father passed in 1987 and her younger brother in 2008.
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In Newcastle, Beverley combined a social work lectureship at Durham University with training and consultancy on equal opportunities and anti-racism. During this time, 1992-2000, as well as training foster carers nationally with the Fostering Network, training all the social work departments, probation services and large voluntary child care organisations in the North East, she published most of her 26 papers largely on anti-racism, feminism, the voluntary sector and, above all, on good practice with black children, including those with one white parent.
When the institutional barriers at Durham University proved insurmountable, Beverley changed careers. She became the first CEO of BECON (Black Ethnic Community Organisations Network). During her time there, 2001-5, she facilitated the black voluntary sector in the North East having a voice on all the strategic regional bodies in the North East. Managing a diverse black team was exhilarating as was taking on the challenges of a region which perceived black people and groups as recipients of charity and found it easier to recognise cultural needs than the consequences of racism.
In 2004 Beverley was offered a PHD studentship at Bristol University on Good Practice with black children in contested family court cases. A fulfilling time ensued, engaging with the social work organisation, the evidence, the same topic in a different setting, with the added challenge of doing this while living in Newcastle. Publication of papers followed the successful completion of the PHD in 2008. The challenges continued. There was now little interest and funding for the black voluntary sector and minimal interest in training and consultancy on anti-racism or equal opportunities. Institutional barriers resurfaced in the university sector in the North East.
Beverley added a new career in her 60’s, becoming a qualified yoga teacher and back care and restorative yoga specialist. Beverley continues to be involved with the black voluntary sector. She engaged with ‘Freedom Thinktank’ to input a black perspective to the North East rather self-congratulatory approach to the commemoration of the ending of the British slave trade. This group worked with museums, art galleries, libraries to insist that the efforts and achievements of the enslaved be recognised. She re-engaged with the North East of England African Community Association, which she currently chairs. She has maintained her interest in social work, initially on the Board of the General Social Care Council and subsequently on the Board of the British Association of Social Workers.
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Beverley now combines her activity in the black voluntary sector, in the church, her yoga teaching with travelling weekly to London to care for her wonderful grandchildren, and yearly, back to Trinidad and Tobago.